Google Chrome For Linux Goes 64-bit 168
Noam.of.Doom writes "The Google Chrome developers announced on August 19th the immediate availability of a new version of the Google Chrome web browser for Linux, Windows and Macintosh operating systems. Google Chrome 4.0.202.2 is here to fix a lot of annoying bugs (see below for details) and it also adds a couple of features only for the Mac platform. However, the good news is that Dean McNamee, one of the Google Chrome engineers, announced yesterday on their mailing list that a working port of the Chrome browser for 64-bit platforms is now available: 'The v8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I've had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks. I believe mmoss or tony is going to get a buildbot running, and working on packaging.' Until today, Google Chrome was available on both 32- and 64-bit architectures, but it appears that the latter was running based on the 32-bit libraries. Therefore, starting with Google Chrome 4.0.202.2, 64-bit users can enjoy a true x64 version!"
Serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Can someone explain the particular benefits of having a 64-bit browser? I particularly appreciate the fact that Firefox currently can't hog all of my RAM when something (oftentimes Flash) spirals out of control. Do web developers use memory beyond the 4 gig limit, and is this a godsend for them?
Re:chromium? (Score:3, Interesting)
Speed. If you're running it on Ubuntu I'm not sure how noticable it will be, but on Windows it is so absurdly faster than any browser you've ever ran that you'll be amazed at what its capable of. Also true on Macs, but Safari4 is not much slower.
When you can keep the entire google suite open in tabs, with other rich web2.0 sites open at the same time and have none of them be any less responsive than a desktop app would be, it really changes how you view the web.
On top of that the tab seperation is a killer feature in and of itself. If you're playing a flash game in one tab and click a link on irc that crashes in another tab, the first tab is completely unaffected.
The only thing still missing is a good addon engine, but for day to day browsing I just can not go back to Gecko, and thats after using Gecko since the days of Mozilla M11.
Privacy Issues Disclaimer (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Serious question (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:!x64 (Score:3, Interesting)
The "The names x86-64 or x64 are sometimes used as vendor-neutral terms to collectively refer to the two nearly identical implementations." line has been included in the article since at least October 1st, 2006 [wikipedia.org].
What you quote as the "since 2006" phrasing is "sometimes used", which is certainly true (I've certainly heard people use the term "x64"), but the phrasing you originally used was "often used", which is a quite different. Personally I've only ever heard "x64" from microsofties, but it does seem fairly widespread there, at least in MS development.
If looking for a term which is generally understable, however, "x64" doesn't really work, as it seems to be in widespread use only in certain communities. "x86-64" is a bit better since it has an obvious connection with the term "x86", which is much more widespread than either of the others; so it stands a better chance of being understood even by someone who hasn't seen it before.
Re:Serious question (Score:5, Interesting)
Cons:
- The benefit from passing from 8 to 16 general purpose registers is very little, and often, counterproductive, as total "true registers", the ones used for register renaming in OoOE [wikipedia.org] remain the same, so with twice the general purpose registers, you halve the renaming register pool. That was specially noticeable in firsts AMD64 CPUs, and *very* noticeable on Intel Pentium D CPUs (Pentium 4 with x64 support and other minor changes), acusing of insufficient register pool volume for the OoOE operation in x64 mode. Newer CPUs, having a higher pool of registers, have less impact when executing x64 code.
- Memory and data cache wasting: Pointers take 64 bits, so unles you're doing your own memory management, with 32-bit offsets instead of using the bulk 64-bit space for adresses, you're wasting more memory, and what is worst: higher data cache usage for the same purpose, with unnecessary CPU-RAM bus overload (remember that OoOE implies data fetching! -imagine a contiguous 32 64-bit pointer vector, taking 2048 bits instead of the 1024 bits that it would take with 32-bit pointers-).
Pros:
However, for some things there is true benefit, and is that the number of registers for SSE operations have been also doubled, from 8 to 16. And because of the nature of the SSE code, which is usually less prone to jump misprediction and with less register aliasing, because of the nature of vector processing code.
Corollarius:
In my opinion a 64-bit operating system makes sense, but an application that doesn't need more than 2GB of RAM, and doesn't need to gain an extra 10% of speed up when running optimized SSE vector code, should be compiled in 32-bit mode.
Re:No One Cares What It's Called - It's Fucking Fa (Score:1, Interesting)
What is puzzling is that cross platform GUI toolkits have been available for 10 years or more, yet developers still insist on coding their own which looks and operates differently to everything else, wasting loads of RAM in the process.
Re:!x64 (Score:1, Interesting)
For how many years has the "vendor-neutral" term been Intel compatible? It would only be fair to call this architecture for AMD compatible CPUs.
Re:What a waste of resources (Score:3, Interesting)
Does it look like the computer of Neo in Matrix 1?
You may kid, but actually, this very *freedom*, to attach everything to everything, and transform the streams of data, while everything is a file in the file system, is *the* killer feature of Linux.
Unfortunately, Linux people somehow act ashamed for it, because the dumb masses, who know jack about actually using you computer and doing it efficiently too, think it would be some cumbersome thing of the past. And the Linux people apparently put the reality of those people above their own much better informed one. (Which is actually pretty pathetic. But understandable, because, well, we aren't the guy that lords the club. Or rules the company party. We aren't the self-confident ones. But hey, there's no reason we can't be. Especially in our expert field.)
Also even more unfortunately, this resulted is the whole GUI desktops imitating Windows and the Mac down to every shitty (or good, the point it that it does not matter) detail, instead of following their own much more powerful and proven philosophies.
I hope that at some time in the future, I will be able to create a team, and hack all those tools into parts and create a new desktop environment, that actually follows that philosophy. :)
(Anybody interested in sponsoring it? Google? You?